Banal Joburg xenophobia

Business Day is absolutely correct to report on how Johannesburg mayor Herman Mashaba’s xenophobic approach to housing delivery is doomed to fail. However, the public should not make the mistake of believing the mayor’s xenophobia is limited to the brash outbursts covered in the media.

The more urgent components of Mashaba’s xenophobia, and that of his administration, are more banal, routine and discreet. For example, in my neighbourhood of Yeoville, which has a large foreign national population, the city is simply reneging on its obligations to the public.

Yeoville recently went through four days without water. The entire neighbourhood (about 50,000 people) was made to collect its water in buckets from only two water trucks. In the same week, water shortages in the northern suburbs were addressed within a day of being reported.

Waste is collected sporadically. Our public swimming pool is dysfunctional. Children are left to gamble on the equally likely possibilities of the water being clear, or brown and filled with rubbish, the pool being empty, or the gates being shut.

With our neighbours, Hillbrow and Berea, Yeoville is among Joburg’s most densely populated areas. Nevertheless, all three neighbourhoods are serviced by the most infrequent of all the Rea Vaya bus routes. In the middle of matric exams recently, the Yeoville public library kept its doors shut on Saturdays.

Joburg’s middle-class residents frown on places such as Yeoville, lamenting children playing in litter-strewn streets. Yeoville’s social struggles, however, are of the municipality’s making.

It has grossly abdicated its duties to the public. Residents in Yeoville, and neighbourhoods like it, cannot afford to be as alienated from the state as their counterparts in Joburg’s well-heeled neighbourhoods.

Even though people in these neighbourhoods rely largely on the private sector for their comfort, the city continues to put disproportionate efforts into ensuring that there is no rubbish in Killarney, that the Sandton public library remains open and that the children of Linden have a place to swim.

These are the unseen measures of Mashaba’s antipoor xenophobia.

The city administration must do more to ensure that neighbourhoods that depend on public goods have full enjoyment of them.